Netspeak: Linguistic Properties and Aspects of Online Communication in Postponed Time Sanel Hadžiahmetović Jurida & Alma Jahić & Jasmina Hanić & Mirza Džanić & Tanja Pavlović sanel.h.jurida@untz.ba ABSTRACT Considering that synchronicity is one of the dimensions upon which electronic communication can be categorised, the present paper examines the linguistic properties and distinctive features of online communication in postponed time, in the context of English as a global language, and Netspeak as a new electronic medium of communication. The paper looks at the ways in which the nature of the electronic medium and the global use of the Internet are having an impact on the English language. This corpus-based study, for which data were collected from several Internet sites, places particular focus on the characteristics of English used in asynchronous settings such as various discussion forums. The analysis, based on Crystal's model (2001), portrays a number of highly distinctive features of Netspeak, proving that the language of communication in postponed time is heavily affected in terms of graphology (emoticons, punctuation) and the lexicon (blending, compounding), with areas where it is relatively easy to introduce both innovation (nonce formation and other ludic Netspeak extensions) and deviation (abbreviations, acronyms). Keywords: online communication in postponed time, Internet, linguistic characterictics, synchronicity, distinctive features of Netspeak Sanel Hadžiahmetović Jurida's educational background, specializations, research interests: PhD in English received in March 2012 from Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek, Croatia MA in English received in April 2007 from the University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) BA in English received in January 2003 from the University of Tuzla, B&H Currently teaching several undergraduate and Master's courses as Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Tuzla (primarily focusing on English Phonetics and Phonology, and Translation Studies) Author of televised schools of English for BHRT, "Mini School" (2009-2010) and "Kako da ne" (20052006). Author of a number of papers published internationally. Attented a number of international conferences. 1. Introduction The present paper examines the linguistic properties and distinctive features of online communication in postponed time, in the context of English as a global language, and Netspeak as a new electronic medium of communication. Considered to be a relatively largely unexplored area, the brand new medium of communication labelled Netspeak is closely related to the Internet, whose dominant effect in everyday lives, on the other hand, is fast growing. The paper further examines and describes some distinctive features of Netspeak, primarily on the lexical and orthographic levels, highlighting its innovative nature given that, according to Crystal (2001: 91), the most general features of Netspeak distinctiveness are currently found chiefly in graphology and the lexicon, these being the levels of language where it is relatively easy to introduce both innovation and deviation. Why Internet? The Internet1 has undoubtedly appeared almost from nowhere to take a rather important role in our lives. Computers have undoubtedly changed the way people communicate with one another. An increasing number of people throughout the world heavily rely on the World Wide Web as the primary source of information on various enquiries. Electronic communication, also referred to as computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become a vastly popular means of communication. Online chatting has, in the recent years, become extremely popular. According to some studies,2 subscribers to AOL (America Online) spend as much as 20% of their time online in various conversations on different chat lines. Crystal (2001) argues that Netspeak is a radically new linguistic medium. The nature of the impact which the Internet is making on the English language has not been thoroughly investigated since the emergence of the Internet. It is only in the most recent years that this area has become popular. A starting point in my deliberations is the approach taken by Crystal (2001), who argues that ‘Netspeak’ is actually a radically new linguistic medium. According to Crystal (2001: 24), the fact that the Internet is an electronic, global, and interactive medium is crucial for the kind of language used on the Internet. The term Netspeak serves as an alternative to terms such as Netlish, Weblish, Internet language, cyberspeak, electronic language, computer-mediated communication, etc. Both Netlish and Weblish can be said to have been simply derived from English, ‘electronic discourse’ highlights the interactive nature of Internet dialogues, while ‘computer-mediated communication’ focuses on the medium itself. As a term, Netspeak joins the club of to-be famous ‘-speaks’ such as Newspeak, Oldspeak, Doublespeak, Royalspeak and Blairspeak, while as a name, Netspeak is believed to be functional enough, as long as it is borne in mind that ‘-speak’ here actually involves both writing and speaking, as well as the receptive elements of listening and reading. Figure 1 below provides an overview of the top ten language in the Internet (as at 31 December 2013), and the total number of Internet users, estimated at some 2.8 billion. Other significant factors include the fact the total number of native English speakers in the world is about 322 million, and that English is spoken as a second language by almost 200 million people around the world, all of whom make their contributions to the Internet in their own language as well as in English. However, English is said to have the richest technical vocabulary of any language (largely because native and non-native speakers alike use it to communicate technical ideas). 1 Capitalised 'I' in the word Internet shows the significance of the new medium. 2 Cf. (1998). Figure 1. Top Ten Languages in the Internet Here is the current language distribution of the languages on the Web: 1. English 2. Chinese 3. Spanish 4. Arabic 5. Portuguese 6. Japanese 7. Russian 8. German 9. French 10.Malaysian All the rest: 28.5% 23.1% 7.9% 4,8% 4.3% 3.9% 3.1% 2.8% 2.8% 2.6% 15.7% Crystal (2001: 2f) states that the Internet is an association of computer networks with common standards which enable messages to be sent from any central computer (also known as host) on one network to any host on any other. It was first developed in the 1960s in the USA as an experimental network which quickly grew to include military, federal, regional, university, business, and personal users. Nowadays, the Internet is the world’s largest computer network, with more than 100 million hosts connected by the year 2000. The Internet provides an increasing range of services and enables vast numbers of people to be in touch with each other all over the world through electronic mail (e-mail), discussion groups, chat rooms etc. There is a wide range of services available, starting from following daily news, looking at advertisements of any sort, via electronic shopping, to spending your time in the virtual world, chatting with people on the opposite side of the planet. A new term has been coined to represent the notion of everything available on the Internet – cyberspace, the space that could be best described as all-in-one; the television, the telephone, the telegraph etc. The present study looks at the ways in which the nature of the electronic medium and the global use of the Internet are having an impact on the English language. Crystal argues (2001: 5) that the electronic medium presents us with a channel which at the same time facilitates and constraints the human ability to communicate in ways rather different from any other situations. This paper will give a brief introduction to chatgroups and the language of chatgroups. More specifically, it will focus on some of its major innovative features found in online chatgroup communication in postponed time (asynchronous). The Study, the Corpus and the Methodology The study is based on Netspeak as a brand new electronic medium of communication. It examines the linguistic properties and distinctive features of online communication in postponed time (the language used in online forums or discussion boards) and highlights particular functionally distinct elements that constitute an online forum thread. Finally, the study describes the distinctive features primarily on the lexical and orthographic levels, highlighting its innovative nature. The data for the study were collected from naturally occuring sources (the Internet). As this study is a part of the author's broader study on Netspeak, data collection for this study was done within a project including fellows from the English Department and a number of senior students majoring in English. The data were collected from the messageboard available on www.escnation.com. The data were relatively easy to collect as they were available in a large number of public venues, not requiring any special permission to be used (free access to various Internet sites). A number of samples were identified, downloaded into personal computer and an analysis of linguistic elements was made. This is deemed particularly important as it allows the researcher to have access to the electronic discourse, and consequently copying the text by marking it with a mouse and then copying. The copied text was then pasted in a Microsoft Word document and saved into own computer (for frequency counts to be made). The corpus included a total of 40 chat samples collected from the online communication in postponed time on the message board, comprising a total of 5,550 words. Chatgroups Chatgroups are organised at particular Internet sites in the so-called ‘rooms’ in which computer users with an interest in a particular topic or topics can freely participate thus contributing to ongoing discussions on particular topics. These are continuous discussions, and Crystal divides them into two situations relating to chatgroups, depending on whether the interaction between computer users takes place in real time (synchronous) or in postponed time (asynchronous). Considering that synchronicity is one of the dimensions upon which electronic communication can be categorised (Baron, 2008: 11), the present paper examines the linguistic properties and distinctive feattures of online communication in postponed time, as stated earlier. Furthermore, Freiermuth (2001) adds that the physiological mechanisms of online chatting are identical to those required for keyboard skills; dexterity, speed and precision are assets. Naturally, online chatting is different from writing, as it mandates a keyboard, a monitor, online access and client-server software. He further argues that, to have online chatting one must have all of these as prerequisite – they cannot be substituted for nor eliminated if interaction is to occur. Asynchronous situations: online communication in postponed time The interaction between users is stored in a particular format, and made available to other users on their request. Users can hence catch up with the discussion in the postponed time, adding their comments to any given topic, and are not limited by time. According to Crystal (2001: 11), one of the popular features of 1980s computer-mediated communication are the bulletin boards, which can nowadays be found in the form of discussion forums of various sorts. Another example is the mailing list, to which users subscribe bearing in mind that all messages sent in to the list will reach everyone subscribed to the list. Here is an example of communication in asynchronous Internet situations (from the messageboard available at www.escnation.com): Figure 2: Chatgroup communication in postponed time How things work in postponed online interaction As it may be observed from this example, a number of chatters are on the same message board, engaging in the same conversation but not at exactly the same time. The operation mechanism of a group can be summarised as follows: Group members send (post) their contributions (posts, messages, articles, opinions, comments, etc.) The system makes all the messages available to all group members Messages can be saved, archived, as well as catalogued Groups are managed either by an individual, referred to as the moderator (editor, list-owner, host, postmaster, etc.) or a small team. Messages are circulated at a relatively high speed (not more than 30 or 60 seconds) Group members post their replies to topics of their own interests Other group members may then post their replies to the replies produced by some other group members An unlimited number of Internet users, subscribed to a particular Internet site (with the permission to use the messageboard or not), have access to the messageboard. Messageboards on various sites are normally organised in a rather practical way, where messages are sorted out by date, and individual users can freely contribute to any given topic with their own comments. Some distinctive lexical features of Netspeak in online communication in postponed time As has been stated earlier, the term Netspeak is an alternative to many other terms that can be found in use, such as; Netlish, Weblish, Internet language, cyberspeak, electronic discourse, computer-mediated communication etc. Its name suggests speaking, but we must remember that it actually involves writing primarily. Here is an illustration of how electronically produced language affects spoken language (Crystal, 2001): a. It’s my turn to download now. (i.e. I’ve heard all your gossip, now hear mine) b. I need more bandwidth to handle that point. (i.e. I can’t take it all in at once) c. She’s multitasking. (said of someone doing two things at once) d. Let’s go offline for a few minutes (i.e. let’s talk in private) e. Give me a brain dump on that. (i.e. tell me all you know) f. I’ll ping you later. (i.e. get in touch to see if you’re around) g. He’s 404. (i.e. he’s not around) h. He started flaming me for no reason at all. (i.e. shouting at me) i. I got a pile of spam in the post today. (i.e. junk-mail) j. He’s living in hypertext. (i.e. he’s got a lot to hide) k. E you later (said as a farewell) The e-prefix has been used in many expressions. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words (1997) notes etext, e-zine, e-cash, e-money. Other examples since noted include the following words: e-lance, e-lancers e-therapy, e-therapists e-management, e-managers e-government e-bandwagon e-books, e-conferences e-voting e-newsletter e-security e-cards e-pinions e-shop, e-list It is evident that it is not possible to say how many of these developments will become a permanent feature of the language. Language change can never be predicted, but only recognised once it has happened. Crystal (2001: 22) concludes that a certain notion of Netspeak has begun to evolve which is rapidly becoming a part of popular linguistic consciousness, and evoking strong language attitudes. Hence the importance of determining its main linguistic properties and aspects. Netspeak can, therefore, be considered an eclectic resource,3 but is arguably more than just an aggregate of spoken and written features. While Crystal (2001: 48) finds it “a new species of communication,” Baron (in Crystal, 2001: 48) calls it, metaphorically, “an emerging language centaur – part speech, part writing.” Crystal goes on to further develop the metaphor to include “speech + writing + electronically mediated properties.” In fact, Crystal calls Netspeak a genuine “third medium,” comprising several properties of both speech and writing, combined with the properties electronic texts display. According to Crystal (2001: 81), one of the most obvious features of Netspeak is the lexicon that belongs to the internet. The lexicon is encountered whenever someone enters one of the Internet situations. Terms traditionally found in technology and computer science, such as cable, disk, bit, binary, and computer are not part of this lexicon, as they form part of the jargon of science and technology, extending well beyond the Internet. On the other hand, there is a large number of words and phrases that have emerged in the realm of Internet-restricted situations and activities in which all major lexical processes in English take place. According to Hudson (2000: 411), one of the causes of language change is expression of new meanings. With the changes in societies, there is always a need to express new meanings in languages. Hudson argues that it is the characteristic of openness that enables languages readily to create new words to express new things, events, and ideas that come along. As far as new meaning is concerned, Hudson (2000: 241) argues that there is no evidence that languages place any limits on imagination, or therefore on new possibilities of meaning. Because of the principle of limited novelty, new meanings with new forms are relatively rare. However, one of the ways to get such words, particularly in an Internet situation, is invention. Distinctive Features of Netspeak: the Findings and the Results The analysis of the corpus, based on Crystal's model (2001), hihghlighted almost all of the highly distinctive features of Netspeak and asynchronous communication. Only 5 features were not observed in the corpus: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. AmE vs. BrE spelling Prepositional phrases Participles Prefixes Suffixes On the other hand, a total of 33 distinctive features were observed in the corpus, as follows (most are simply listed, those in bold are exemplified in the brackets, and others elaborated on separately in the paragraphs to follow): 1. Special fonts and styles 2. Lower-case letters (do you have a citizens advice bureau there?) 3 Davis and Brewer (in Crystal, 2001: 47): Writing in the elctronic medium, people adopt conventions or oral and written discourse to their own, individual communicative needs) Messages in capitals are ‘shouting’ (u 2 will I KNOW U WILL… speak to each other in UA ) Non-standard spelling (gamez, yup, nope, phreak, kool, etc.) Punctuation (while Israel was giving votes it sais Urovision in the background!???!!??) Grammatical variation Contractions (he’s happy misha…looks like we’ll be stuck with the ukrainian frenchie; we wont, cos i dont really speak it…i understand it) 8. Attributive adjectives 9. Conjoining/coordination 10. Personal pronoun references 11. Compounds 12. Blends (bottop, netizen, netiquette, cybercide, bugzilla, etc.) 13. Absence of lengthy quotation 14. Anaphoric cross-reference between messages 15. General feedback reactions found as opening sentences 16. Particular format of a chatgroup message body 17. Short messages 18. Topics embedded into other topics 19. Members accommodating other members, thus sharing linguistic character 20. Providing opportunity for equal participation 21. The peer-group factor 22. Overwhelming use of the pronoun I 23. Reliance on private verbs (e.g. think, feel, know) 24. Frequency of it, used to introduce a personal comment 25. Word-class conversion 26. The use of nicknames (Y_not_Chat, Pompompom, groggy, EuCROVision_Man, PaddyD, etc.) 27. Nick-initiated lineation (<Superstar> ) 28. Identification of message-types generated by the software 29. Several sources of visual distinctiveness (emoticons, rebus-like abbreviations, colloquial elisions) 30. Emotive punctuation (hey!!!!, whadda f...!?!?!) 31. Frequent perverse spellings and typographical errors (outta, seemz, cee ya, etc.) 32. Ignorance of capitalisation (Vasilis7: if i am what?, Raul-espWiGrBF: i said are u here?are u?) 33. Omission of a copular verb (i fine) 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Neologisms Concerning the emergence of neologisms, a number of patterns have been observed in terms of prefixation, and suffixation, as well as compounding. The following provides an overview of some recently observed trends, broken down by several categories: Compounds It is characteristic of Netspeak that in combining two words to make a new compound word, one element is found repeatedly, as in the following examples: o mouse: mouseclick, mousepad, mouseover, but also phrasal verbs: mouse across, mouse over, o click: click-and-buy, one-click, leftclick, rightclick, double-click o ware: shareware, groupware, freeware, firmware, wetware o web: webcam, webcast, webmail, webmaster, webster, webzine, webliography o net: netlag, netdead, netnews, hypernet, Usenet, Netspeak o hot: hotlist, hotlink, hotspot, Hotmail, HotJava o bug: bugtracker, bug fix, bug bash, BugNet Prefixes A special set of items is found in use as prefixes or combining forms: o o o cyber-: cyberspace, cyberculture, cyberlawyer, cybersex, cyber rights hyper-: hypertext, hyperlink, hyperfiction, hyperzine e-: e-voting, e-list, e-shop, e-security, e-books, e-managers Blends Blends, where part of one word is joined to part of another, are instantiated in examples like: netiquette, netizen, infonet, cybercide, datagram, Infobahn, Internaut, bugzilla Blends are typically found in Netspeak as two words of a phrase with parts of both, ordinarily the first part of the first and the last part of the other. In comparison to clippings and acronyms, blends can be said to start out as simple abbreviations, but given their appearance which is more word-alike, they become new words, like in the following example taken from asynchronous chat: Belgium 15.. (posteby by tonyvision on 2015-04-18 8:37:24 pm) o flop top or average? Who came up with this flop top thing? Bottop!! [R] – TomofLondon 2015-04-18 8:39:52 pm Other ludic Netspeak extensions Some otherwise straightforward lexical suffixes are often extended in a playful way, as in: o –itude: winnitude, hackitude, geekitude o –full: folderfull, windowfull, screenfull, bufferfull o –ification: hackification, geekification Innovations Several types of lexical innovations have been observed, too, as follows. The replacement of a word-element by a similar sounding item, as in: o ecruiting: electronic recruiting o etailing: electronic retailing looks like a special type of blending, heavily relying on subtraction. Further, we note productive use of word-class conversion, normally from noun to verb, as in: to mouse, to clipboard, to geek out, to 404 Lexical innovation through unusual spelling Nicknames that are universally accepted (and are the norm, to a certain extent) can be spelled in a wonderful and/or weird way, making them special, which at the same time results in a refreshing of the vocabulary stock. Some examples of nicknames taken from Crystal (2001: 161) include the following; sleepless, shydude, pilot, Dutchguy, irish, cloudkid, oldbear, bfiancee, Pentium, pcman, froggy, tulip, BMW, cheese, Godot, BeaMeup, Elvis, Stalin, sexpot, buttspasm, HITLER, HAMAS, Nicknames from the corpus this study is based on, as collected from www.escnation.com include: EuCROVision_Man, EuroFan, Groggy, Impreza, Ivan_macedonian, Le-Royaume-Uni, Nikki, Norwegian, Pompompom, Superstar, Lalalala, Hadrianople, Y_not_Chat, Yiorgos These nicknames fall into several categories: Empty: Y_not_Chat, bex Sonic: Lalalala, Pompompom Ludic: Impreza, Groggy Typographically playful: PaddyD, Le-Royaume-Uni, EuCROVision_Man, etc. The same respelling tendency frequently produces nonce-formations: grouping words together into a compound (e.g. what a unifreakinversitynerd), or linking a number of words by hyphens (e.g. dead-slowand-stop computer), which may qualify as a conversion from phrasal bases. These are illustrated in the following asynchronous chat sample: As serious a question as I’m ever likely to ask – boogwewillallshine – 2015-04-25 6:19:26 pm o MacBos for certain, Turkey most likely, AlbArm maybe, Cyp rather not [R] – Stefan-LST Trip to Athens – 2015-04-25 6:56: 11pm o macedonia and bosnia…[R] Niall@work! – 2015-04-25 6:56:11 pm Ad-hoc lexical innovation may be due to deliberate mixing of languages, as in the following example where Spanish elements are mixed with English: Glassos espanoles (www.escnation.com) Abbreviations and Acronyms Netspeak is also notorious for its variety of abbreviations. Acronyms are quite frequently used. Some of them include: BCC: blind carbon copy FAQ: frequently asked question HTML: hypertext markup language ISP: Internet Service Provider URL: uniform resource locator Names of many firms and sites: AOL, IBM, IRC Combinations of letters and numbers: o P4P: Platform for Privacy Preferences o 3Com: Computer, Communications, Compatibility The acronyms found in various Internet situations are no longer restricted to words or short phrases, argues Crystal (2001: 86), and they can be sentence-length: GTG (got to go), WDYS (What did you say?). Individual words are reduced to several letters: PLS (please), THX (thanks). Hudson (2000: 242) defines acronyming as “a sort of clipping in which a phrase is replaced by a word based upon the first letters of its words.” Bauer (1983: 237) essentially agrees with that definition by saying that: An acronym is a word coined by taking the initial letters of the words in a title or phrase and using them as a new word, for example Strategic Arms Limitation Talks gives SALT. However, it is not necessarily the case that every abbreviation counts as an acronym: to be an acronym the new word must not be pronounced as a series of letters, but as a new word. Bauer (1983: 237) gives the following example here: if Value Added Tax is called /vi: ei ti:/, that is an abbreviation, but if it is called /væt/, it has become an acronym. It may be noted in the following example that the use of abbreviations is accompanied with rather emotive punctuation, as well as emoticons, clearly showing three Netspeak features employed in a very short chat sample alone. BTW…the parrot won :) [R] – Tin Tin -2015-09-09 11:01:40 pm o LOOOL!!!! And presenter? – Frank – 2015-09-09 11:01: 52 pm We also note that apostropheless contractions (contractions without apostrophes) are generally very frequently in synchronous chat. However, the example below shows that an individual chatter’s choices of contractions with or without apostrophes may vary even in short chat sessions: Line 8: Ashea: he’s happy misha…looks like we’ll be stuck with the ukrainian frenchie Line 24: Ashea: we wont, cos i dont really speak it…i understand it The Use of Emoticons The corpus for this study included a total of 227 emoticons, as shown in Table 1 below. Here is an excerpt from a chat sample from the corpus, illustrating the use of emoticons: Shame she sang it so terribly [R] – SamB – 20:58:28 OMGWTF? It's the Slovenian flag! [R] – Dagfinn – 20:58:38 o Gotta love it :D [R] – Sild – 21:00:23 o Yes, it is the flag reflecting on the song title...'Home is Here' or 'this is where home is' [R] – JohnS – 21:03:20 Nooooooooo : ( [R] – sellout – 20:58:46 I knew it that this long dress will end up to a disaster : S [R] – Marios – 20:59:06 Source of Internet data www.escnation.com Number of words Number of emoticons 5,550 227 (4.1%) Table 1. The Use of Emoticons The Use of Abbreviations It may be noted in the following examples that the use of abbreviations is accompanied with rather emotive punctuation, as well as emoticons, clearly showing three Netspeak features employed in a very short chat sample alone. Table 2 below shos the total number of abbreviations found in the corpus. BTW…the parrot won :) [R] – Tin Tin -2015-04-09 11:01:40 pm o LOOOL!!!! And presenter? – Frank – 2015-04-09 11:01: 52 pm Source of Internet data Number of words Number of abbreviations www.escnation.com 5,550 38 (0.7%) Table 2. The Use of Abbreviations The Use of Attributive Adjectives Table 3 below shows that a total of 482 attributive adjectives were used in the corpus for this study. Source of Internet data Words Attributive adjectives % www.escnation.com 5,550 482 8,7% Table 3. The Use of Attributive Adjectives Some examples of attributive adjectives from the corpus are shown below: Will: did I ever tell you about the psycho nutjob flatmate I had who did a runner? But Plan B is mega super whooper cool! –Sasha Concluding Remarks The data for this study were collected from naturally occurring sources available from the Internet site chosen as the corpus for this paper. All data examined in this work were obtained from the www.escnation.com message board, and were then further analysed, bearing mind at all times the model used by David Crystal (2001), and starting with most of his suppositions and claims. In addition to my overall conclusion that online communication in postponed time (asynchronous) clearly displays a vast number of distinctive features, here are some of my other major observations and conclusions: Vocabulary: Chatters increase variety through the use of creative and highly innovative language forms Chatters almost always prefer colloquial to literary language Chatters are limited by their environment Chatters freely reduce multi-word sentences and sequences of response utterances to a sequence of initial letters: bbfn (bye bye for now) Spelling: Chatters tend to use less words, and modify spelling as to meet their needs, thus producing nonstandard or perverse spellings. Most chatters comply with the lower-case letters rule on messageboards; cases of messages in capitals were registered where chatters were either frustrated over something or wished to underline their points. Chatters seem to be aware of the information value of consonants as opposed to vowels, judging by such vowel-less items as txt (text), and tmrw (tomorrow) Punctuation: Chatters tend to use emoticons quite frequently as a way to express their feelings and attitudes. Chatters use emoticons freely and without much hesitation Grammar: Chatters frequently use comment clauses, introduced with it. Chatters tend not to use copular verbs, with registered cases of no subject-verb agreement. Chatters use the pronoun I without much hesitation, while other pronouns are not as frequent. I wish to conclude this work by quoting David Crystal on the emergence and future of Netspeak (2001: 242): I see the arrival of Netspeak as similarly enriching the range of communicative options available to us. And the Internet is going to record this linguistic diversity more fully and accurately than was ever possible before. What is truly remarkable is that so many people have learned so quickly to adapt their language to meet the demands of the new situations, and to exploit the potential of the new medium so creatively to form new areas of expression. References Baron, Naomi (2008). Always on: Language in an Online and MobileWorld. Oxford University Press Bauer, Lauri (1983). English Word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (2004). A Glossary of Netspeak and Textspeak. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Crystal, David (1995). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Davis, Boyd H., Jeutonne Brewer (1997). Electronic Discourse: Linguistic Individuals in Virtual Space. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press Freiermuth, Mark (2001). Features of Electronic Synchronous Communication: A Comparative Analysis of Online Chat, Spoken ad Written Texts. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Gunther, Marc (1998). The Internet is Mr.Case’s neighbourhood. Fortune 137.6: 68-80. Hudson, Grover (2000). Essential Introductory Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words (1997). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Internet source: www.escnation.com
